At the expense of over-simplification, one may identify several different approaches or emphases which have successively characterized the study of agricultural geography in the United States. These include:

Commodity studies, especially studies of individual crops.

Small-scale studies of crop-land relationships.

Large-scale field studies of agricultural land-use and landscapes.

Studies using the cultural-historical approach, and

Studies using a theoretical-quantitative approach.

I would propose a sixth approach to the geographical study of agriculture, which I will call the systems approach. I believe that it can encompass all of the best objectives and methods of each of the previous approaches. It is a con-ceptual framework designed to accommodate within a single interrelated body of knowledge the comparative study of any or all of the diverse elements and varieties of agriculture that exist in the world.

According to Spencer, the geographer must view the methods of combining fields, crops and cultivation practices, that is cropping systems, from the per-spective of the whole culture of their practitioners1. This is highly desirable. Yet it is the imperative "must" that is objectionable. Cropping systems can also be conceived of as having an independent existence. The development of classifications of cropping systems has thus its own justification merely because the systems exist. There are also other aims. Detailed descriptions of cropping systems enable adequate comparisons to be made both in space and, given adequate source materials, in time. Furthermore such descriptions permit the review of conventional terminology and its modification if necessary. These considerations naturally apply to rice cultivation systems, which are almost as diverse as the peoples practising them.

This diversity of practice leads in two directions. One is in the direction of terminology that is so broad as to be of very limited value except at the highest level of generalization. What, for example, is included in the categories "wet rice", "dry rice" or "irrigated rice"? In the other direction is the way towards elaborate and complex classifications in which diversity may be sub-sumed. Thus no apology can be made for the complexity of the tentative scheme which follows.

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Roland D. Hill, Department of Geography University of Singapore Singapore